The INKE Partnership is a collective of researchers and partners who are concerned with networked open social scholarship and the future of scholarly communication in the digital age. Networked open social scholarship involves creating and disseminating research and research technologies to a broad, interdisciplinary audience of specialists and non-specialists in ways that are both accessible and significant. It builds on a foundation of digital scholarship, social knowledge creation, open access, and digital humanities. On Thursday September 8th we will discuss the broader scope of networked open social scholarship. We will also consider the following questions within this context: what are the best ways to how to mobilize knowledge across researchers and fields, and between academia, the public, and other invested stakeholders? What implications for policy implementation do open knowledge practices have? Which alternative modes or methods need to be developed or employed for effective open social scholarship? How can we develop initiatives collaboratively to best serve these ends?

Please join us for what is sure to be a stimulating day of presentations and discussions.

This forum is open to the public and free of charge, and is hosted by the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough. We are very grateful to our sponsors for this event, Iter: Gateway to the Middle Ages and Renaissance; the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough; and the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, University of Toronto Mississauga. This forum is organized by William R. Bowen, Ray Siemens, and Alyssa Arbuckle. Please contact us with any questions!

Last month, I had the chance to participate in INKE’s “Sustaining Partnerships to Transform Scholarly Production” conference in Whistler, BC. In its second year, this conference holds a special place for me, since it’s the one time I get to see the diverse people within INKE who collaborate digitally throughout the rest of the year. The pleasure of catching up with colleagues from near and far was equally matched by the diversity and forward-looking ideas shared during our jam-packed conference schedule. This group really knows how to come together both as a collaborative and an intellectual community, sharing ideas in the spirit of forward momentum that can only be achieved through a diversity of group-minded creative endeavors. With this spirit of our gathering in mind, Alyssa Arbuckle and I co-presented our paper “Intersections Between Social Knowledge Creation and Critical Making.” In our lightning talk, we argued that the production of scholarly platforms functions as a critical making activity, where researchers, publishers, librarians, and others can work to embed the intellectual values of open and social knowledge exchange into the online platforms they produce. In essence, we argued that the testing of theoretical concepts and ideas can and should figure into the collaborative production of digital scholarly platforms, making scholarly production a venue for bringing cultural and theoretical models to the real-world experience of online users.

I had the chance to present a real-world example of the critical process Alyssa and I outlined during the Digital Demonstrations portion of the gathering, where I demonstrated Pedagogy Toolkit. Pedagogy Toolkit is an open source repository of digital teaching materials that I am building with microgrant funding from the ACH at http://pedagogy-toolkit.org/ . Among other resources, the Toolkit hosts community-generated guides for teaching with digital humanities tools. This means that classroom implementations of digital humanities tools can function as feedback for the tool developers, while key features produced by the development team can inspire creative applications of a given tool in the classroom. What’s more, experienced digital pedagogues can test and share their digital activities through the Toolkit site, where those new to digital pedagogy can easily access those activities and integrate them into their own classes. This is all by design, since the Pedagogy Toolkit project is deliberately built with the critical concepts of cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional sharing and collaboration in mind. As such, it attempts to implement the critical production process Alyssa and I advocate in our paper. In addition to helping theorize the intersections between digital humanities tool development and pedagogy, my project explores web design and repository building strategies that make those connections happen in the real world. For this reason, I was particularly excited to see developer-led presentations of Voyant and NewRadial at the gathering, in addition to hearing Alix Shield discuss her research applications for JuxtaCommons.

At the gathering, I also revealed an upcoming addition to Pedagogy Toolkit: an online syllabus builder that will let anyone rapidly template a draft digital humanities and/or composition syllabus (produced through the critical synthesis of contributions from a range of digital pedagogues in various fields). The syllabus builder will be launching as a beta soon. For me, this online tool isn’t (just) powered by the web code I’m writing, but also by the intellectual contributions of a wide and diverse online community. This feature of the Toolkit project not only seeks to build communities in and around digital pedagogy, but also demonstrate how and where those communities contribute raw material for building the project out in new directions. This self-propelling process of production in many ways reflects my takeaway of the Whistler gathering as a whole: in building community, we build the intellectual crosswalks our future work will traverse.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about how to make my collections in NewRadial visually meaningful. Since beginning to think about how NewRadial and other Digital Humanities tools could be useful in the classroom, I have been curious as to what degree a collection assembled in NewRadial can communicate an idea or argument that someone else could learn from, interact with, and challenge. My focus has been inspired by Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s suggestion that digital platforms for the humanities “make scholarly work available to the wider public and encourage its response…[and] show the scholar’s work in process, as fragments, that precede the finished product in the form of a book or journal article. Instead of the monograph springing fully formed from the mind of the scholar, we begin to see the building blocks, like a painter in her studio” (Lopez interview with Kathleen Fiztpatrick). I think that presenting scholarly work to students in network form invites both critical and creative thought since, by showing the many different modules that make up any given argument, the student becomes aware that no academic, no matter how experienced, produces a fully-formed argument on the first draft (a fairly common expectation, I have found). It also makes evident the fact that the individual parts that make up the finished narrative, the ideas in primary and secondary source texts that the scholar employs in their argument, belong to other ‘networks’ and that they could be re-assembled by the students themselves into many more; in other words, that no single interpretation offers an authoritative perspective.

One of the ways I attempted to test the degree to which my own collections made these ideas evident was by returning to collections I had previously made in NewRadial, particularly those made before NewRadial’s design was changed to allow the user to use both directionless and single-direction edges to connote relationships between nodes. I interested in the differences between collections that employed solely directionless edges and those which also used single-direction edges, but what I found really remarkable was a similarity. I had used my collections to develop scholarly papers and so, in one sense, each network represented a narrative that I had created but that narrative, whether I had used single edges, directionless edges or a combination, was inaccessible to me in the form I had structured it in for my paper. In returning to my collections, I had to go through each node and edge at random, and while the single-direction edges guided my reading more explicitly than the directionless ones I was unable to use the collection to re-create the exact narrative of my paper.

This is not to say that my arguments, ideas, questions, and thought processes were entirely obscured. But unlike going back and simply reading last semester’s papers, my experience of the related NewRadial collections was undirected and disorienting. It was an active rather than passive process, and one that included an element of randomness since there was no indication of where to begin and end, and even the single-direction edges only hinted at the next step. This experience recalled to my mind another quotation from the same interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick:

“we have this romantic notion that the author produces an idea and conveys that idea perfectly into the brain of the person who is reading the text. That the reader perfectly obtains that idea and processes it in exactly the way that the author intended, should the author have done his job perfectly. And, in fact, it’s never been that straightforward. The possibility of misreading has in fact been the norm. And the reader has always been free to do with the bits and pieces of the text what he or she will.”

Clearly networking my arguments, even when integrating narrative elements into the network, meant relinquishing this “illusion of control” entirely. It was almost impossible that another user, encountering my collection in NewRadial, would begin and end where I had done so originally. I couldn’t even achieve that myself after only a couple of months had passed. But it also meant that so many more meanings, so many more interpretations and arguments became possible via this networked configuration than had been the case in the traditional narrative form of these same arguments.

This element of chance which networking my arguments introduced into my and other potential user’s experience of my work is not unique to NewRadial or even to computational processes of any kind. In 1969 Samuel Beckett explored this freedom of the reader to experience the text in any number of ways through his short story “Sans”- which he one year later translated into an English version entitled “Lessness.” The 120 sentences of the piece, which are divided up into 24 paragraphs, suggest a sense of underlying structure through image and aurality but they are assembled entirely randomly. To create the short story text, Beckett composed each of the sentences and then drew little slips of paper out of a container to determine the order they would appear in. As a result, the version Beckett published represents only a fraction of the possible combinations, and the text can be reassembled into “8.3 x 1081 possible orderings” (Drew and Haahr) according to how the reader constructs the meaning of the text for themselves. Drawing on this potential, Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haahr created “Possible Lessnesses” (https://www.random.org/lessness/) a website which generates all of the different potential versions of “Lessness” one at a time for the user.

The reader’s experience of “Lessness” in many ways reflects the scholarly process of researching relationships and tracing patterns and then translating this work into narratively structured arguments for journals or monographs. As Drew and Haahr observe, “Although Lessness is linear prose, its orderly disorder calls for a reading process in which the reader works to untangle the threads of sameness and difference to discern the underlying structure, becoming aware of the usually unconscious processes of interpretation…Meaning emerges in the perceived space between order and randomness, and is derived from the work the reader does in sorting through the randomness and patterns in the text” (Drew and Haahr). Working with edges in NewRadial, this becomes almost literally the case: the meaning, the patterns I observe and trace emerge in the spaces between the nodes, the edges I create between them, the space between the ordered and methodological research I conduct and the creative inspiration that forms my narrative from the pieces of primary text and scholarship that I reassemble to communicate my meaning. This is the same space into which readers of my work can bring their own meaning, commenting on my edges, adding their own to strengthen the existing connection, adding entirely new edges between new pairs or groups of nodes, or taking the nodes I use for one narrative and putting them in an altogether different one of their own creation.

Furthermore, “Lessness” illustrates the way in which associative and narrative relationships can function in tandem to produce meaning. All of the different sentences which are the nodes of Beckett’s piece are thematically associated, existing in a directionless relationship with one another, which is full of potential meanings but not narratively structured. It is up to the reader, after recognizing this associative relationship, to trace the single-direction narrative pattern that they perceive in the piece. But no narrative pattern which the reader creates is ever authoritative or final: each time a reader approaches the piece can produce a different, and just as legitimate, narrative pathway based on different relationships they interpret between the sentences in the associative ‘network’ of the story. “Lessness” is therefore eternally a work in process; it can never be finished because the building blocks are constantly being re-formed by each reader’s individual experience. This is, I think, the kind of scholarship that Fitzpatrick envisioned: one that, rather than being afraid of the possibility of ‘misreading’, actually creates space for it to happen overtly, embracing the element of unpredictability, of randomness, in every encounter with any text. Networked arguments which employ both associative, directionless connections and narrative, single-direction relationships that represent a progressive movement towards a conclusion facilitate this process. Incorporating narrative elements into networked arguments enable the user to produce meaning as well as assert relationship without the subsequent narrative masking the scholar’s work in establishing the associative relationships that underwrite it. It also reveals the creative, unplanned pathway towards discovery that these associations lead the researcher down as well as the alternative trails that their chosen narrative did not follow. By making these processes explicit, researchers can not only embrace the potential of other scholars to read alternate meanings into their work, but can open this process up to the next generation of academics.

We are still exploring all of the implications of introducing single-direction edges into NewRadial. As Jon Saklofske observes of this blending of narrative and network approaches to meaning making, we are still “realizing ways to productively braid these two motivations and to further understand their interplay”. However, I don’t think a conclusive answer is necessary. As we explore and challenge the processes that underlie our scholarly work, more productive uses of these two approaches will emerge as we create space to experiment creatively and challenge our habitual ways of reading, writing and researching.

As part of my research for NewRadial I map and annotate ideas for papers and projects which I am currently working on in school. As a T.A. I have also found it a useful tool for putting together class material and preparing the ideas I want to talk about with the students in the first year English class that I am assisting. Recently, as I was researching for a class I was going to teach it occurred to me that NewRadial’s social element (when collections are “public” users can comment on each other’s collections) might lend itself to classroom discussion as well as scholarly debate. Since NewRadial had already been so useful for my own work in terms of thinking about texts from new perspectives, I thought that it might help to generate a more lively debate amongst the students. Because NewRadial doesn’t update in real time, I decided that the best way to approach using it as a teaching tool was to make it a part of the reading assignment in preparation for the class. After being given a username and password as well as a handout on the basics of using NewRadial, I asked the students to read the text and then each create at least one edge between two nodes of the story and comment on at least one edge that someone else had generated. To facilitate their work I created my own, much larger, collection and provided a link to my example.

My aim was very specific. I have found, both as a student and in my recent experience as an instructor, that students frequently look for the easiest answer when it comes to interpreting texts. Accustomed to hearing teachers talk about what the central meaning or message of a text is, they have learned to look for meaning which has a broad application in the real world outside of the text. Since the primary justification for literary studies continuing to be part of public school curriculum often involves rhetoric about the edifying nature of studying classic books, students become adept at identifying positive central themes in texts which “figure in the discussion only as a box from which to pluck vital and interesting social, moral and political issues” (Booth 267). By the time a student arrives in a first year university English course they have generally developed a reading practice that enables them to quickly identify social commentary within a text but the result of this is that they rarely pay close attention to the form of the text, and have very little ability in terms of a vocabulary for exploring how the author produces this message. They have spent so much of their time looking for hidden meanings that they have stopped looking at the text itself. This becomes something of a shortcut for students, especially when dealing with historical (rather than modern) works since the ‘right’ answer can be produced if one simply identifies the ‘other’ of a text (women, members of a different ethnicity/social group/religion) and the ways in which they are subjugated by mainstream society. Since working with digitally enabled text models in NewRadial was so productive for me in terms of thinking outside of this box I thought that assigning work in NewRadial might break the students out of this pattern and encourage them to take a closer look at the story. In order to do this, I started by asking them to use connective edges between nodes to show me not what the story “means” but what it does. Instead of giving me an interpretation of the whole, show me how different elements are connected. For examples, I suggested connecting different textual images to each other, or connecting a descriptive moment to an active one in order to show how they work together.

When the morning of the class arrived, I found that nobody had completed my assignment. I believe this was, in part, related to my position as a T.A. rather than a professor as well as the fact that the extra work I asked them to do was not directly connected to any marks. As a current student, I certainly understood the burden that extra work presents and I did expect some of the students to disregard my assignment, but what surprised me was what I learned when I went to the class. After asking students who had used NewRadial to look at the text why they did not create any collections, many of them told me that they found the interface confusing. Although I experienced something of a learning curve in my early work with NewRadial, this was not the reaction I had expected.My own rationale behind attempting to use NewRadial in the classroom (one which I think is shared with other instructors) was that students who have been immersed in digital technology all their lives would be more comfortable working in a digital environment.

I started thinking about what made NewRadial different from other digital technologies that I use and the one quality which really seemed to differentiate it was intuitiveness. The digital technologies with which I and many other students are most familiar, like mobile apps, are designed to enable the user to interact with them in a very specific, clear-cut way and self-limiting way. On the other hand, NewRadial is designed for a variety of secondary-scholarship research practices and as such the interface doesn’t prescribe its use in the manner of other digital technologies. Because it exists as a workspace, it doesn’t produce or present anything to the user. Anything accomplished in NewRadial is entirely the work of the user, not the interface, and it is what the user does with the sources they incorporate into their collections or in the discussions they have with other users that productive scholarly work takes place. I think that this is a necessary element of any productive DH technology as well as a key part of the reason pedagogical work in the Digital Humanities is so important.

This is because most of the digital technology we have become accustomed to directs not only how we use it but how we perceive and understand the information it relates, and it does so covertly. Before being introduced to Digital Humanities, I had never considered in a serious way how any of the many programs and technologies I use throughout the day influence the way I understand what they tell me about the world around me. In fact, until university I didn’t even have the vocabulary necessary to perform such a critical analysis. I treated all programs as raw, objective, unmediated sources of knowledge and I assumed a level of transparency, only coloured by my own subjective experience. This perception didn’t come out of a vacuum, either. As a student, I was thoroughly educated regarding what kinds of digital resources were scholarly and which ones were inappropriate for academic work but I only ever considered the data and I was never taught to examine how it was being presented. And in a world where more and more of what we learn comes from digital technologies, I think it is of the utmost importance that educators give students the tools they need to question how digital technologies influence what we do with the limitless information that they provide access to. How better to teach this kind of literacy then by using Digital Humanities tools in the classroom?

I think the same mindset which limits literary scholarship problematizes pedagogy. Students, like authors of scholarly journals and monographs, are tending towards finished products, definitive answers, rather than an experience of exploration and learning. Accustomed to both teaching and technology that give ‘right’ answers, students are becoming uncomfortable with the ambiguity and contradiction necessary for literary studies which is always at one level a creative exercise. This ethos becomes more problematic when students use digital technology. A good humanities teacher or professor will always acknowledge areas of uncertainty in the information they present to their students, but data gathered from digital sources, which frequently use simplified visualization techniques, often has the false appearance of ‘raw’ fact which is something students have been trained to seek out. Students without a critical education in digital technology risk being programmed by their programs, trained like computers to follow the same intellectual pathways over and over again.

After all, as Jesse Stommel observes, like digital technology, “pedagogy is not ideologically neutral” and educators have a responsibility to make that apparent to their students. Stommel advocates a hybrid model of Digital Humanities Pedagogy, what he calls “Digital Critical Pedagogy” which “is concerned less with knowing and more with a voracious not-knowing. It is an on-going and recursive process of discovery.” Rather than simply using digital technology to do what is normally done in the classroom on computers in an attempt to keep the humanities relevant or appeal to a digital generation, DH tools offer a unique ability to learn both about the subject matter they present and about the ways in which our use of them shapes the our world. One of the opportunities many DH pedagogical tools, including NewRadial, offer the classroom is an opportunity for students to encounter and interact with each other’s work in a meaningful and productive way through forums and online commenting. This sort of work breaks free of the ‘right answer’ paradigm and engenders discussion and debate. Interactive digital environments which students can manipulate have a two-fold benefit since they offer space for student discussion while helping to start conversations about how the presentation of data can impact how different people interpret it. In the words of Paul Fyfe, “the goal is to keep students’ attention on the critical labor that digital resources seem to dissolve” in order to enable students to both use digital tools productively for education as well as making them conscientious users of technology in general.

I now think that there will be a significant learning curve for students in Digital Humanities classrooms. Critical thought is not something which is encouraged by mobile apps or social media platforms, and in fact, their ease of use not only does away with the need for instructions of any kind but also with analysis. Beginning to reflect on something which is, for this generation of students, ubiquitous will feel somewhat counter-intuitive. Using it for educational purposes will be even more so. But after having considered the question, I believe that it is imperative that students are empowered with the educational tools necessary to be discerning data consumers who use digital tools as a means for contemplation as well as information.

Booth, Stephen. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time and All Others.” Shakespeare

In my last blog I suggested that the format which a text takes within the NewRadial interface (a collection of nodes which the user can draw edges between to connote relationship) is actually a model of the text rather than simply a re-presentation of the same object in book or even e-book form. I also asserted that in any area of scholarly inquiry, method will shape the product and I think that this assertion holds true for working with a model as well. Scholarly research which is in part a product of experiments with nodal text models will necessarily produce an understanding of the text object which is different from the traditional approach to a text as a unified entity.

Over the course of my initial ‘experiment’ with a textual model in NewRadial, the use of this model proved an illuminating method of research which enabled me to see elements of the text which were previously concealed from me when I worked with its more traditional format. However this experience also raised two important questions for me:

What is a model of a text?

How does a digitally enabled model of a text differ from the original text?

I don’t know if these questions can be answered before a body of literary criticism is produced using the tools which the Digital Humanities offer us, but in terms of beginning to formulate an answer, I think it is helpful to first return to the idea of NewRadial as a mapping environment in order to understand the nature of the model it produces. Maps and models are similar in a number of basic ways. Both maps and models are representations of an original which are created to help the user negotiate aspects of the original which are difficult to perceive or interact with. Both maps and models are generally concerned with scale, and often reduce the subject to a smaller (or larger), more manageable form. Most importantly, both are very useful tools whose usefulness, in part, depends on the user’s recognition of them as tools. Thus maps and models help us to do very similar things: to interact on a meaningful level with objects whose scale or complexity make them difficult to engage with by creating a version of the original which we can manipulate easily for exploratory purposes. The user does not anticipate that the trail they are hiking will be identical to the red line they draw out on a map any more than the science student thinks that molecules are indeed composed of Styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners. But they are still useful in terms of providing a new way to perceive the original which can aid in the development of a better understanding of the original.

Another important aspect of models and maps, one which will bring us back to the question of literary texts, is that they dramatically alter not only the way we perceive the original but also how we experience it. The experience of reading a map is not the same as going to the real place, and no one would call it a substitute, but it will influence the way we experience a place when we actually go there. And more than simply changing our experience of an original, it can improve this experience by allowing us to explore the particulars while maintaining a holistic sense of the original and our situation in relation to it. This is achieved, in part, through the model’s scaling process which enables users to address the original from different levels, either as a whole or part by part. The creation of a model necessarily involves a degree of categorization and compartmentalization with regards to its parts, and this organization makes both the individual parts and the whole more accessible to the user since the model enables them to move more smoothly between different levels of address, giving them a clearer concept of both the whole and the parts, as well as how the relationship between the parts makes up the unified object.

In nodal models of digital texts this process is particularly useful since text objects are already “massively addressable at different levels of scale” (Whitmore 325) such as the chapter, paragraph, line, stanza, or sentence. The model of a text augments this quality of the original by allowing the user to almost instantaneously shift from a paragraph-by-paragraph perspective to examining how those paragraph nodes relate to one another within the larger radial of the model. Furthermore, the interactive nature of the model enables the user to re-organize the model according to their specific purpose by re-categorizing the parts into groups or separate radials. The practice of isolating and categorizing parts of a text according to common ideas they express or a thematic element which establishes an over-arching relationship is a common practice in literary scholarship but it is largely implicit. The visual element of the NewRadial interface makes this process of compartmentalization explicit since the way in which the re-categorizes the parts of the text object is made visually apparent. The user effectively manipulates the model NewRadial generates in order to construct one of their own, one which uses specific parts in order to say something about the whole. This visualization makes the user more aware of their movement between different levels of address in relation to the whole, as well as enabling a greater degree of self-consciousness since the process of constructing an argument becomes a much more literal process of selecting different parts and connecting them to one another. In this light, I suggest that models (including maps) are differentiated from originals because unlike the original which is generally conceived of holistically, a model is its parts, and its usefulness lies in the way in which it allows a user to experience the individual parts separate from the whole while maintaining an awareness that they are parts of a separate whole.

So a nodal model of a text in NewRadial does not differ from the original in terms of its particular details but in the way the user encounters those details. The words and images remain essentially the same but the user experiences the text in a dramatically different way than when they read it in a linear, narrative fashion from beginning to end. Jane Gallop’s comments on traditional reading practices were particularly useful to me as I considered this. She observes that “We have been trained to read a book globally: that is, to think of the book as a whole, identify its main idea, and understand all of its parts as fitting together to make up that whole.” (Gallop 5) What struck me as most interesting as I considered this comment was her emphasis on the action “to think” and the way in which she suggests that this mode of engaging with a text prescribes, to a certain degree, how the text will be interpreted. Text, particularly fiction or those texts which we refer to as “literary” are objects of thought. They are born of the inspired thought of the author, who publishes her or his text in order that an audience can participate in their thought process, think about the subject matter themselves, and form their own unique thoughts based on what they have concluded is the “main” or “central” thought presented in the original texts. Simply put, this is the process of literary criticism.

Models and maps, on the other hand, are objects of doing. They are inherently active in that they encourage the user to interact with them as well as think about them. As such, they prescribe (to a certain degree) the manner in which they are to be used rather than the conclusion that the user will come to. As Colin Bowers helpfully observed in his blog post “Negotiating Modularity,” NewRadial is “process-based and not (only) results driven.” So in approaching an original text in the manner in which Gallop describes, the parts always equal the whole and the whole is always a central or unifying thought. In approaching a model of a text in NewRadial, the parts, in this case the nodes, can relate to each other without necessarily having to relate back to a central idea. This is not to say that they don’t relate back to a central idea, since any ‘good’ literary text will have a degree of unity (even very experimental ones) but that the process of approaching the parts in isolation, without a view of making the relate back to the whole can change our perspective on a text. A model requires users to explore it on the ground level, wandering its various trails without worrying about how to get back on the highway. The user might still end up there, but their experience will be much different than traversing the original, and, I think, much richer.

As scholarly researchers, it can still be difficult to break away from the influence of the global approach to the book in order to explore the particulars without the hegemony of the author’s linear organization. As a visual activity, I think our reading is influenced by the ways in which text is visualized in different formats and the unified physical text object of the book is no exception. As I mentioned earlier, scholarly research generally involves isolating and re-categorizing different parts of a text at different levels of scale. This process usually begins with a holistic reading of the text, after which the reader extracts parts in the form of quotations which represent larger ideas which the writer wishes to address in their article or monograph. Working with a model of the text alters this process in several ways. Breaking down the unified book object into a radial of nodes emphasises the way in which the whole text is constructed of parts, disrupting the user’s sense of the book as a unified object while still enabling them to fluidly move to addressing the text from a holistic scale. As well, when a user extracts a nodal ‘part’ from NewRadial’s model of the text, the space which that part occupied within the entire radial remains empty, actually allowing the user to see not only the parts of a text they want to isolate, but what the consequences of this extraction are for the whole. This enables an entirely new understanding of how individual passages work within a given text.

So models of texts allow for a new relationship between the text object and the reader, who, through the use of a digital model, becomes a user as well. This shift necessarily makes the reader-user’s work process-based rather than outcome-centered, since the user of the model controls their own experience of the text to a greater degree than when they work with a traditional narrative format. In terms of NewRadial, when users work with a nodal model of a text which is interactive and displayed in a radial rather than a linear pattern, they have the opportunity to determine their own pathways through the text rather than following the single path which an author creates for them. Of course this ability is not meaningful or productive unless the user has first read the text since NewRadial is designed for secondary scholarship, but for a scholar in search of truly new experiences within a text, this kind of perspective shift has two key benefits.

The first of these benefits has to do with NewRadial as a process-based interface. As Colin Bowers observes, “the older methods did a much better job of hiding or distorting the real processes of research activity to the researchers involved.” As literary scholars, we are often very familiar with our research practices but much less conscious of our reading practices and the ways in which they shape our interpretations. As both a student of literature and a lover of books, I sometimes find it difficult to perform the mental shift necessary to read a text critically rather than simply being drawn into the world of the book, following the author’s path without analysis. Furthermore, like most products of Western educational systems, I have been trained when approaching a text for the purposes of reading to, just as Jane Gallop says, “identify its main idea, and understand all of its parts as fitting together to make up that whole.” And this reading method, just like my choice of research method, will colour the products of my research, leading me down the same paths again and again. But the nodal model of the text that NewRadial produces doesn’t allow the user to simply follow the same path through the text which they walked on their first reading, marching towards a main idea which will make all of the parts fit together. The user cannot simply think about the model the way they would reflect on the text, they have to do something with the model. In terms of Gallop’s description of global reading, this means beginning with the parts and moving towards an idea rather than beginning with an idea and making the parts fit into it. This process of interacting with the model means that not only will the user begin to forge new pathways through the text, but also that their own reading practices will become evident through the contrast of their experiences of first the text and then the model, enabling them to move in directions they haven’t before.

The second benefit which is related to the first is that by creating a model of text which is interactive, NewRadial gives users the opportunity to be path-makers within the world of the book, wandering off of the author’s linear prescriptions to create new connections and new experiences. A text model in NewRadial is useful because it allows the user to perform a kind of “doing” as thinking (Moretti 11). The user can use NewRadial’s model as a map with which to create paths of exploration, to break the text down into its parts to examine how they fit together. These discoveries are meaningful because they shed new light on the user’s original experience inside the text object, not the model. When the user leaves the NewRadial environment and returns to the place of the book, they are more familiar with its paths, they know its parts more intimately as separate entities, and they no longer think of these parts simply in relation to how they produce a unified thought. Rather, working with a model reveals all of the various thoughts which the separate parts encourage a reader to experience, thereby enriching the experience of the unified original object.

In my own experience, by making, experimenting, exploring, and building within NewRadial, I acted out a new way of thinking about text using my model. This was doubly fruitful for me because when I stopped thinking of a book globally and began to think of it as made of up various parts or potential paths, what I saw was not only the model of my text or even the text proper. What working with a model exposed for me that my usual approach to a whole text could not was a closer look at the unconscious ways I lead myself continually to find the same things in different texts. In other words, experiencing a model of the text, doing as a kind of thinking, gave me new critical insight into my own practices of doing and thinking, and the way treating a text as a whole has influenced my experience of a book and my interpretation of its meaning(s). This insight into my reading process also translated into an insight regarding the process of the book in generating meanings, since instead of approaching the text as a passive reader looking for unity, I encountered it much the way the author wrote it, connecting small part to small part, stepping back to look at the whole that I had created only after I was done working with my pieces.

Working with a model of a text object such as the nodal models which NewRadial produces are ultimately beneficial because they allow the user to shift perspective, drawing attention to the ways they are used to interacting with a text and allowing for new experiences and meanings to be produced. This is achieved through a method which allows the user to think through a text by approaching the text not from a global scale but via its individual parts. The process of thinking then becomes a process of thinking by doing as the user experiments to see how the parts do (or do not) work together to create different experiences for the reader. The usefulness of models of texts will ultimately depend on the user’s willingness to let go of their traditional methods of reading for a kind of exploration which may lead to new discoveries or nowhere at all. This is the risk of experimentation, but in exchange for the freedom to experience text in brand new ways, it seems like a risk worth taking.

]]>http://inke.ca/2014/12/15/the-text-model-working-with-digitally-enabled-models-of-texts-in-newradial/feed/0The Fault’s Not in our Starshttp://inke.ca/2014/11/14/the-faults-not-in-our-stars/
http://inke.ca/2014/11/14/the-faults-not-in-our-stars/#commentsFri, 14 Nov 2014 19:35:52 +0000http://inke.ca/?p=2182[Submitted by Colin Bowers]
This is the question I wish to explore in the following remarks: do traditional grammars and frames change of their own accord through the collision with new materialities, new cultural dominants, and new forms of technology?
Hegel contended that the owl of Minerva only took flight at night, and similarly, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen in their book Imagologies : Media Philosophy* claim that it’s nearly impossible to theorize in-the-midst-of, while process is ongoing, happening. Critical reflexivity nearly always requires some kind of theoretical distance from the work researchers are engaged in, and one common form for this distancing to take is temporal, as Hegel’s remark intends: theory most often comes after, but that moment of ‘after’ is one of those categories that is guaranteed in processual movement (see my first blog post above). This is my biggest concern with the Heraclitean aspect of NKE’s that are always in motion, always expanding or shrinking, never static and nearly always incomplete; how do we manage to keep a relatively accurate cognitive map (to borrow Fredric Jameson’s terminology) of the complexity of the processes we’re engaged in? I don’t mean to suggest here that theory should enter the picture and survey the progress and legislate the directions it must go in; shutting down potential avenues of creative and subversive play. However, human beings are lagging behind in developing the conceptual tools and perceptual apparatuses that our technology demands, as well as in the invention of new metaphors and tropes for describing and evaluating what is actually going on in DH fields. As a result, I think we have no choice but to employ inherited theoretical paradigms and older terminologies until we’ve succeeded (assuming we ever can) in catching up with the changes that we have initiated but that are moving forward with a momentum of their own. For example, a professor** recently corrected me when I said I need to turn off my phone- they aren’t ‘phones’ of course, they’re really mini-computers with multiple functionalities, of which the phone is only one. The point is, of course, that everyone still asks to borrow someone’s phone if their battery has just died, and we know what they mean– even if the purpose is to borrow their ‘camera’ to take a selfie). The hope is that the outworn phrases and terms might acquire a jarring and provocative shock-effect when adopted in the new situation; the words themselves remain the same, but the context has completely changed, and therefore the meaning of the older terms potentially acquires a new valence.

Fredric Jameson has a somewhat lengthy passage that I’ll reproduce in full which is worth considering in the context of this discussion, although I’m not sure I necessarily agree with him:
…the paradox from which we must set forth is the equivalence
between an unparalleled rate of change on all the levels of social life
and an unparalleled standardization of everything– feelings along with
consumer goods, language along with built space– that would seem
incompatible with just such mutability. It is a paradox that can still be
conceptualized, but in inverse ratios: that of modularity, for example,
where intensified change is enabled by standardization itself, where
prefabricated modules, everywhere from the media to a henceforth
standardized private life, from commodified nature to uniformity of
equipment, allow miraculous rebuildings to succeed each other at will,
as in fractal video. The module would then constitute the new form of
the object (the new result of reification) in an informational universe:
that Kantian point in which raw material is suddenly organized by categories
into an appropriate unit.
But the paradox can also incite us to rethink our conception of change
itself. If absolute change in our society is best represented by the rapid
turnover in storefronts, prompting the philosophical question as to what has
really changed when video stores are replaced by T-shirt shops, then
Barthes’s structural formulation comes to have much to recommend it,
namely, that it is crucial to distinguish between rhythms of change inherent
to the system and programmed by it, and a change that replaces one entire
system by another altogether. But that is a point of view that revives para-
doxes of Zeno’s sort, which derive from the Parmenidean conception of
Being itself, which, as it is by definition, cannot be thought of as even
momentarily becoming, let alone failing to be for the slightest instant.

I don’t think New Radial or other NKE’s has/have pretensions to replace one system (by which Jameson means ‘mode of production’) with another, although it does make use of and extend the ‘commons’ and, as such, stands against the profit motive. I see it instead as an ‘enclave’ space that does take advantage of ‘pre-fabricated’ modules but allows them to connect and enagage with other modules and it facilitates those encounters without erecting an over-arching metalanguage that forces those databases to abandon their own unique indexical and ontological character. So yes, there’s an element of ‘pre-fabrication’ to databases, but the uniqueness of NR lies in the encounter, in what users build within their collections, and that much at least is free-flow, emergent and unpredictable; I would argue that it’s not difference with an underlying sameness, but an initial standardization or sameness that produces, through various digital events coordinated by multiple authors, genuine originals or startling combinations.
* “What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, pratical, engaged. In a culture of simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late” (p. 2, 1994.)
** I owe this point to Dr. Tony Thomson, in conversation. Fall 2014.

New Knowledge environments, such as New Radial, are better models of how research in the humanities and social sciences actually happens; it is process-based and not (only) results-driven. In some ways, I believe that our research has been that way for a very long time and that what NKE’s offer us is a better representation of what we’re actually doing, whereas earlier barometers and measuring tools of the process of research itself, in its happening, did not do such a good job. Indeed, I’d argue that the older methods did a much better job of hiding or distorting the real processes of research activity to the researchers involved, in ways much like the real generation of surplus value is unseen by workers in the process of capitalist production. The fetish of the ‘final product’ or a ‘beginning, middle and end’ to the research story likely began with good intentions, as tools or templates used to facilitate the process of inquiry, and without which a project or essay could likely not even get off the ground.

But, these quickly became reified categories that channelled and directed researchers’ attention to the ‘results’ of a study, the ‘new findings or insights’ generated in an original theoretical essay, and these results generally only found legitimation when presented at conferences, published in a journal or a printed book– often after such a long period of time has passed, that the author has to add footnotes to explain that certain events that have since transpired have dated, or even rendered irrelevant, some of the key discoveries. We’ve likely all seen a conference speaker at the end of a conference presentation pick up the sheets from which they’ve been reading, shuffle them, tap them into order, lay them back down on the lectern, and say something like “that’s all, thank you very much”– most of us have probably been that person before. But of course, that’s never ‘it’ and projects never really end (more on this below). Earlier drafts of essays and projects are usually retained on a flash drive or CPU somewhere, but they rarely see the light of day– certainly not the public light of day.

In New Radial for instance, researchers can return to their collections (and those of others) and find a visual map of their progress, reminding them of avenues they might momentarily have forgotten to follow; the track of breadcrumbs is right there in front of them to re-trace, and the ‘discoveries’ already discovered are subject (perhaps) to amelioration or revision in view of the alternative path or forgotten connection that’s once more come to our attention as a result of the new environment we’re using and its decided benefits. We also likely can all remember that middle-school or high-school mathematics teacher who admonished us to “Show our work!” and may have tempted us by giving us partial points on a test, even when we’ve not gotten the correct answer, but demonstrated in detail how we made it to the wrong one. Part of the inhibition, I’m sure, is psychological: the process of getting to the ‘end’ is messy, frustrating, chaotic and disorderly, and people are reluctant to ‘show’ this aspect of their work to others, particularly if they’re being judged by it. As Susan Brown (et al.) reminds us, “[r]esearch domain, project conceptualization, and publication options are all crucial determinants of how “done” will be defined for a particular project. Project members need to arrive at a shared understanding of what constitutes an acceptable degree of intellectual maturity, critical mass of content, and technological finish at initial publication” (4). Funding agencies aren’t likely to be thrilled by a lot of talk about where a project is at some point in the middle, even when we’re not yet at the beginning; they want us to describe what we expect will be the ‘end results’.

There is also the case for rigour and quality, as Jon Saklofske points out in a forthcoming paper:

To function as a modular piece that gains the potential to be reused,
reconfigured and recontextualized, something needs to be instantiated
and published as a version or “set.” This modular node, this “something”
could be a quotation from a previously published book or article, an
object from a digital archive—but it needs to originate in a project that has
reached a versioned milestone of public release. Perhaps this is the key to
successfully preserving and extending modularity from print cultural practice
to digital environments: maintain the idea of versions or witnesses, but also
realize that such versions are always reconfigurable and interoperable, but not
necessarily progressive or corrective.

Modularity is more inspired by Heraclitus than Parmenides, yet I think we do need to find islands of rest in the slipstream of research; something that can be ‘instantiated’ or a ‘versioned milestone’, to borrow Saklofske’s wonderful term. Just as there is a danger of making the slice or the cut too soon and arresting the process too prematurely, there is also a danger of letting projects spiral outward indefinitely (as they will do if we don’t locate those nodes of temporary ‘finishedness’). The question for me then becomes: where do we make that slice? How arbitrary or necessary can, or must it, be?

One of the initial questions which interested me in my early experiences with NewRadial was whether such a radical alteration research practices and argument development would produce a different approach to literary critical practice and interpretation. Given that the approach that we take in research and the development of critical argument shapes the questions that we ask and the results which we produce, NewRadial as a method for scholarly research engages with specific theoretical principles of literary criticism, potentially affording us fertile new perspectives on primary and secondary texts and their underlying relationships. This potential for digital humanities to impact the production of literary studies was evidenced in the concern and skepticism with which early forays into mapping critical analysis of literary texts. For example, Franco Moretti`s distant readings of Hamlet, Our Mutual Friend, and The Story of the Stone, were met with concern and skepticism by more traditional scholars. The primary objection to Moretti’s method and mapping as a mode of literary criticism in general was the reductive effects of data visualization on literary texts. As Lisa Gitelman observes, “few literary critics want to think of the poems or novels they read as “data,” and for good reason” (Gitelman 3). The product of Moretti’s approach, his plot maps, do seem to be distinctly different from the texts which they represent and the critical analysis which Distant Reading provides seems quite divorced from the engagement with text which is so central to literary studies. However, much of this criticism is a result of reading literary maps as finished products akin to journal articles and monographs rather than as a tool for study which works in tandem with traditional close reading practices. Unlike Moretti’s Distant Reading, NewRadial employs mapping within a workspace, as a mode of research rather than the finished product, but the central concern remains. In reducing a text to nodes in order to establish relational edges, will NewRadial ultimately produce reductive criticism or can the new perspective on text objects which the interface affords users actually enable a more broad consideration of the formal and contextual aspects of a literary text?

Reduction of the literary text in critical analysis is not a concern unique to network analysis. Feminist, Marxist, Psychoanalytic and Historicist readings of texts are often accused of subordinating formal aspects of the text to their own agendas by treating the literary object as a product of its contexts, informed, defined and limited by the patriarchal hierarchy, capitalist system, or historical period the critic is interested in. As Felski observes, “What the literary text does not see, in this line of thought, are the larger circumstances that shape and sustain it and that are drawn into the light by the corrective force of the critic’s own vigilant gaze” (Felski 574). Context, seen as having preceded and produced the literary text, can therefore “correct” the idea that the text is its own authority with regards to its meanings by asserting the text’s own blindness to the manner in which it participates in a larger discourse of which it is only a small part. In other words, the story of a literary work begins with its contexts and ends with its text. A troubling result of this understanding is that much criticism has become focused on rehashing the question of supremacy of text or context. However, if processes of thought and research are indeed informed and shaped by the forms their expression take then it is entirely possible that the creation of this dichotomy is a natural result of a narrative approach to research which forces its elements a linear pattern in which there must a beginning (context) and an end (text). If we were to shift to a network approach to literary studies such as mapping, could we perhaps start a new conversation? One which, rather than debating where the story starts, at text or at context, eschews a linear understanding for a relational one which asks what new meanings are produced when the critic wanders a text’s many relational edges or paths.

In a secondary research mapping environment like NewRadial, the theoretical implications of the form of argument immediately become clear in the lack of differentiation between primary and secondary source nodes: in appearance, the node that represents either type of source remains the same, and these nodes interact on the same level playing field with one another. Thus the defining characteristic of any given node on a map becomes the relationships that node to the other nodes on that map as they are generated by users. If the NewRadial prototype was regularly used by a knowledge community the impact of community-generated edges would make the theoretical implications much clearer: an exploration of any given text could reveal a vivid and ongoing life of a text object which is not simply a static product of a given time period but continually establishing, strengthening, or challenging relationships between the object, its audiences, and the various data contexts with which it interacts. Furthermore, an approach to secondary scholarship which mapped out existing relationships would literally create areas of uncharted territory for the intrepid literary explorer as well as highlighting areas of contention and debate. Instead of one linear path to meaning with a beginning and an end, networks reveal many paths, many relationships. Instead of one conversation which argues whether the story of a literary text begins with the text itself or with its contexts, a multitude of new conversations as interpretive roads less traveled by are revealed and explored.

As Moretti observed in his plot analysis of Hamlet, “once you make a network of a play, you stop working on the play proper, and work on a model instead” (Moretti 218) and I think this idea of working on a model instead of the text itself is particularly applicable to the exploration of network relationships in digital mapping environments. This became clear to me in my early encounters with NewRadial as I experimented with mapping my arguments instead of developing them through narrative. I realized that in stepping into the map world of NewRadial, I had left the place of the book behind even as I continued to work with my chosen text object. My question then was “what then was I working with?” and Moretti’s work seems to provide an answer. The challenge, then, was to experiment with a model of a literary work in order to determine whether reducing the text to a model within the workspace of NewRadial would ultimately produce a reductive critical analysis or if a network approach could indeed negotiate the questions of text and context in such a manner as to avoid minimizing, distorting, or obscuring the text proper in favor of the model or of the contexts.

At this time I was working with one text which lent itself particularly well to these questions. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a stylistically complex account of one woman’s descent into madness which also serves as a vehicle for attacking the patriarchal Victorian era medical system and its use of the rest cure to treat “female hysteria.” A piece with such distinctive formal elements as well as an obvious engagement with historical and feminist contexts seemed like the perfect model for an exploration of the relationship between text and context within network arguments. As I began to work the theoretical implications of working with nodal representations text rather than the body of the text itself became apparent. Working with a model of the text which consisted of a collection of nodes representing the paragraphs of the story enabled me to visually isolate parts of the texts which I felt were interconnected, rearranging them in various ways with my secondary sources. This ability to rearrange my primary text with regards to the relationships I was establishing between its nodal model and those of my secondary sources reinforced for me the idea that I was working with a model, something I could change and play with, something I could explore rather than argue with or against. The more connections I made, the more it became clear to me that there were more connections to be made, and the more I broke apart my texts and contexts to peer at them from different perspectives, the more I wandered the paths I created, the more the character of my work changed from researching to support my argument to experimenting with the relationships I had created. The question of context threatening to subvert text or vice versa became for me irrelevant because working with model representations of my data objects to create a relational map did not require me, as a narrative argument would have, to decide on a place from which to start in order to arrive at an ending which had already, in part, been decided through my methodological approach. I could go anywhere.

But what about form? A great deal of the criticism of current context-focused narrative approach to literary studies concerns its reductive treatment of the literary text and its negligence of aesthetic questions with regards to meaning. Do networked or mapped arguments really allow for a more balanced appreciation of both form and context or is the node just another way to reduce form and put it in its place, subordinated to the sociological, historical and political contexts which produced and produce the text? It is my opinion that it does, but it does so within the given limits of the environment as a place to perform initial research and explore secondary sources. Part of this capacity has to do with the structure of the model of the text which NewRadial produces in breaking the body of the text up into nodes, which in the Gilman piece represented the individual paragraphs of the story. The short story’s reliance on the divisions of its paragraphs to communicate various levels of meaning as the protagonist descends into madness become more clear once they are isolated into nodes on map, revealing the way in which the form of the text, its aesthetic characteristics are part of its function within the network. The assertion appears counter-intuitive given that the form of the text has been broken up into a model which in many ways bears little resemblance to the original, but this model gives the user two methods of exploration which a traditional book does not and these allow for the development of a new perspective. The first, which is not unique to NewRadial, is the ability to search the text for key or recurring words or phrases, revealing patterns of language which expose the underlying meaning of the text. Although this kind of search is available in almost any digitized version of a text, it has a different impact here because NewRadial does not work with the text, it works with a model. The result of this is that once patterns have been identified through the search, they can be isolated visually by moving the paragraph nodes in which these patterns occur. Manipulating formal elements of the piece rather than approaching its aesthetics as a whole enabled me to create specific inter and extra-textual relationships with other nodes, establishing a relationship between specific formal elements of the piece and the contexts of Victorian patriarchy which Gilman wrote it to address.

What mapping provides that makes it important, then, is a unique environment wherein context and form can exist in dialogue without being subordinated one to the other. By experimenting with a model of my text, relationships emerged not only between my primary text and secondary sources but also between the meaning and form of the piece. The character of my work changed from researching to support my argument to experimenting with the relationships I had created. My exploration of the aesthetics of the story became one and the same with my exploration of its contexts, as mapping the relational edges revealed the two were interrelated. The more connections I made, the more it became clear to me that there were more connections to be made. My experience began to ironically mirror Gilman’s narrator’s interpretation of the wallpaper: like the narrator, I began my work by imaging patterns of relationship between my nodes but the more that I looked, the more that I imagined these connections, the more patterns seemed to emerge as if on their own, underlying the patterns I was drawing like a palimpsest. The more I broke apart my texts and contexts to peer at them from different perspectives, the more I wandered the paths I created, the more I became lost within the emerging patterns. The map, like the moonlight of “The Yellow Wallpaper” illuminated complex relational patterns which had been previously invisible to me. But unlike the narrator, I was not a prisoner of my patterns but an explorer. Using the NewRadial mapping environment, I created new paths through these patterns which liberated new meanings, alive meanings that grew and changed the more that I worked with them. I had left the place of the book behind only to find that my model was a map of that place that led me down paths of Gilman’s story that I had never travelled before.

Whether a network approach can produce a non-reductive literary critical method which can lend equal weight to questions of form and context remains to be seen. What is certain is that the development of such a critical method which allows for an equal appreciation of form and affective impact as well as context and historical effect must begin with a shift in how we view texts and their relationships and this shift is already taking place within the realm of digital humanities.

A note of update for those who are subscribed to the DHSI e-mail list, following our earlier announcement of anticipated 2015 offerings over the summer. Please feel free to circulate this note to those you think would be interested in DHSI 2015!

Fabulous 2015 Offerings (Registration & Scholarships)

We’re very pleased at the response we’ve already received about our offerings for 2015, the result of consultation with our community about the topics and material we’d all like to see covered at DHSI now and in the future, as well as a call for proposals for courses among members of our community. This year, we’re able to have a number of additional courses on offer and, overall, smaller class sizes to facilitate better our learning together! As well, following DHSIers’ suggestions, there is also the opportunity to take more than one course, by having several fabulous DHSI offerings during the weeks just before (1-5 June) and after (15-19 June) DHSI’s core week of 8-12 June.

At the moment, preparations for 2015 are already humming along in Victoria, and our ‘quiet’ launch of our registration earlier has resulted in courses beginning to fill … even a bit ahead of anticipated schedule. As in the past: if there’s a course you or a member of your team absolutely must have, we’d recommend registration earlier rather than later for it!

If you’ve not yet seen the list of 2015 course offerings (at http://dhsi.org/courses.php; also below) and our schedule (at http://dhsi.org/schedule.php), we’d really encourage you to do so. We’re pretty excited about it! And, in addition to a great mix of classic courses and new ones recommended by our community, we’ve got some great talks planned by, among others, David Hoover (NYU), Claire Warwick (U Durham), Malte Rehbein (U Passau), and Constance Crompton (UBC-Okanagan) — as well as our DHSI Colloquium, lunchtime unconference sessions, birds-of-a-feather gatherings, and much more!

Further, as we do every year, we’ll have the pleasure of awarding a number of tuition scholarships. Application is via http://dhsi.org/scholarships.php, and these scholarships cover tuition costs with the exception of a small, non-refundable administration fee (students $150, non-students $300). The absolute deadline to apply for scholarships is 14 February, though the scholarship committee considers applications on a regular, rolling basis and evaluates applications based on need, merit, and course availability at the time of evaluation; scholarship spots tend to fill exceptionally quickly. We’re also very pleased to be working with ACH and GO::DH for sponsored travel bursaries (!); details on our website.

We’re very, very happy to welcome and work with our new and returning partners and sponsors last year and this — among them the University of Victoria and its Library, the University of British Columbia Library, University of British Columbia Okanagan, the Simon Fraser University Library, the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing (Publishing@SFU), the Innovation Lab @ VIU Cowichan and Vancouver Island University, the Simpson Center for the Humanities at University of Washington, the Pacific Northwest Colleges Consortium, the College of Arts at University of Guelph, the Centre for Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Arts at Ryerson University, English, North Carolina State University, Hamilton College DHi, Bucknell University, Texas A&M University, NYU English, CUNY Graduate Center, CulturePlex @ Western U, and the Digital Humanities Group at UC Berkeley; project partners and sponsors including the Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project, the Modernist Versions Project (MVP), NINES, the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC), the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CWRC/CSÉC), the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC) project, the TEI Archiving Publishing and Access Service (TAPAS) project , the LINCS partnership, and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project; and organisational partners and sponsors including the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO), the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS), the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN), the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH), the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO), the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC), Compute Canada, the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

We’re so very grateful for such good company! And we’re even more pleased to note that membership in these groups allows discounted registration (details at http://dhsi.org/registration.html).

. . . And a new Graduate Certificate in DH!

Recently, U Victoria has launched a DHSI-based Graduate Certificate program in Digital Humanities, with applications received beginning September 2014 for intake in May 2015. The certificate program can be taken in conjunction with other graduate degrees at Victoria and elsewhere, or on its own. Furthermore, one of the most unique elements of this program is that it allows those who come to DHSI to receive graduate university credit for the work they’ve done while at DHSI, in combination with courses at other partner institutes (Oxford, Leipzig, and HILT, among many others) and institutions. Please see our homepage announcements bar for further details and news about the program.

—

It is shaping up to be another banner year, and we hope very much that you are considering joining us for it! (And do tell a friend!)

In this paper, I will discuss and demonstrate how the inherent difficulty associated with the unique work and non-traditional production methods of William Blake have prompted me to turn to digital platforms to answer the kinds of research questions that I am posing. I originally used digital technologies to extend my perceptions and to work with specific examples from Blake’s work in ways that traditional research methods and materials did not allow. Using minimal funding, and hiring an undergraduate programmer, I led the development of NewRadial, a java-based downloadable tool designed to initially sort, browse through, manipulate and comment on William Blake’s iconic pages in a visual environment. Although NewRadial was initially developed as a prototype intended to open new possibilities for traditional critical approaches relating to William Blake’s work, its usefulness beyond specific Romantic period material and related research questions soon became evident. It has since developed into a much more robust new knowledge environment (associated with the INKE MCRI) and has been redesigned as a web-based (HTML5 + javascript) collaboration space that is not only able to more responsibly and rewardingly import and work with a broad variety of humanities database material (including the ARC catalogue), but is also helping to envision new models of inquiry and scholarship. The growth of NewRadial (from a Blake-inspired tool to an environment that is helping to redefine the ways we might engage in scholarly collaboration) is an example of the way that larger methodological initiatives and metacritical ideas can emerge from addressing particular Romantic-period concerns through digital technologies. However, other questions concerning Blake’s work have recently prompted me to develop another small-scale, custom-made, single-purpose tool to enhance and further my critical perceptions in ways that traditional materials and methods cannot. Custom-fade, a basic html tool, allows for image crossfade comparisons between the variants of William Blake’s printed images, and is opening up further possibilities and unique opportunities for critical investigation.